


me and my husband

by funkandwag



Series: this fleeting feeling is infinite [1]
Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Multi, Suicide mention, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:40:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24905488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/funkandwag/pseuds/funkandwag
Summary: how long can you go on loving someone even when you know you can't stay with that someone? what's it like when you love someone so much and he loves you so much but you still don't know each other? what's it like when you still know him better than most people do? what sort of woman would harry du bois love. also, how fucking sick would it be to be an entreponetic researcher, holy shit, it'd be so fucking sick. also also, i did the fucking math, they were together for a long-ass time, yes harry has his moments of pathos, but to be fair, they've known each other for a long fucking time.
Relationships: Harry Du Bois/Dora Ingerlund, Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi
Series: this fleeting feeling is infinite [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1802161
Comments: 19
Kudos: 31





	me and my husband

**Author's Note:**

> CW: explicit suicide mention, unhealthy relationships
> 
> edited: 7/3/2020: made minor changes, may make more.

first.

Let’s do the numbers, Dora: he was twenty-four, twenty-five when you met? And twenty-six when he joined RCM, twenty-eight when you seriously left the first time, and thirty-eight when you left him “for good”. So, really, you were together for twelve years, give or take. It doesn’t sound like such a big number, does it? Not in the grand scheme of things. Not something to make a fuss about. 

You think of him whenever you see something disco and whenever you see a Mirova policeman in the winter uniform: black, with a flat cap. You think of him whenever you see a particularly broken down drunk, or whenever you can hear a couple arguing in the distance. 

(There’s a brilliant, well-respected colleague of yours, who’s married-but-estranged and constantly smells of whiskey. You’ve been told that knowing her will do wonders for your career; every conversation with her makes you wonder if Harry has a lost twin, on top of every other tragedy in his life.) 

Whenever they give you a plastic container at the store, and you think:”Oh, I’ll need to wash this out, to keep it.”

You think of him often. 

second.

The first thing you noticed about him was his ass. You wish it had been his conversation or something properly intellectual or suitably mystical, but it was his ass. It was a hot day, so he wasn’t wearing track pants over his shorts and all shorts were, at that time, _short_. His were blue and ended mid-thigh (sinewy, hairy, tanned), perfectly containing the two perfect globes of his (it cannot be said enough) perfect ass.

The first thing you said to him was: “I’m not. And if I was, what’s wrong with doing something men do to _me_ all the time?”

(It was in reply to the first thing _he_ said to you, “Miss, why are you staring at me? Did I sit in something?” And here, he craned his neck to see if there was anything on his back. He made a great show of it, twisting this way and that, arching his back a little, sticking his ass out a lot.) 

And then you turned (face burning) to face the road, resolute. You made a vow of chastity, celibacy, and modesty -- properly ashamed, bound to never be caught in such a vile act again. (A little, whining voice: What if he took it as an invitation, Dolores? You don’t know this man. He could be a murderer. He could’ve fallen in love with you. He could be a murderer who’s fallen in love with you.)

(Your reply? How romantic. Precisely the sort of man I see myself building a future with.)

Because Revachol has an interesting sense of timing, that was when the skies opened up, casting down blood-warm rain. You had an umbrella. He didn’t. The bus wasn’t going to arrive for another twenty minutes.

You kept your eyes on the road. (Step.) On the trash floating in little rivers made by the rain. (Step.) On the oily sheen of the rainwater. (Step.)

“Can I wait under your umbrella?”

His clothing clung to him like a second skin. 

(“A little hair is fine, but _that_ much is ridiculous, don’t you think?” 

“...Sure.”)

Definitely Not Looking at His Chest, you said, “Why not.” 

Yet another step, this one bringing him right under the umbrella with you, edging you halfway out into the rain. His hand right above yours, his side pressed against you, his drenched t-shirt (red, with a bulging torso emblazoned next to the phone number of a gym) soaking into your professorial blazer. Ten minutes passed. _His_ bus arrived. He got on.

After a moment’s hesitation, you followed him.

(There’s a sweet version Harry would tell, where you were so enamored of his Masculinity, you forgot what bus you were supposed to go on. He left out the part about his ass. Usually, he left out the ass part, except when you weren’t paying enough attention to him at the party and he wanted everyone to know that you hadn’t always been so indifferent.)

And you’ve always been skinny. (Or “slight” or “petite” or some other word for “weak-looking”.) And you were blonde. Have a beak of a nose that people call “elegant”. 

It was a natural fit.

third.

When you were a child, you imagined the Pale to be like an ever-growing field of snow. Cold. Muffling everything. Softening the hard edges of buildings. Something you could leave tracks in. Your parents did not try to disabuse you of this belief. Quite frankly, your parents did not care what you believed, as long as you were seen to be a good girl. It was easy enough. As long as you kept your mouth shut and you wore whatever Mother picked out for you, they were satisfied. 

So, you were allowed to check out whatever books you wanted from the library. (Footnote: “Libraries are admirable institutions,of course. But they are _public_ institutions, so please wash your hands after you’re done with your books, darling.”) All the books you wanted were about the Pale, and they were all far beyond your reading level. 

Surprisingly enough, there wasn’t much of a market for entroponetic books targeted at a school-aged audience. The only one you still have (possibly the only one) is entitled _What’s the Pale?_ (Other books in the series: _What’s the Antecentennial Revolution?; Who Was Dolores Dei?; Why is Revachol?_ ) The font was rounded and based on an adult’s idea of a childish scrawl; the paper designed to look like the composition paper used in school. No photos, because the Coalition nations hadn’t released their weather balloons’ findings at that time. 

No drawings, either. How do you depict an absence? How do you depict the negation of matter? Not its rearrangement, not its reduction to its component parts, but its actual _undoing_. As if it never were. How do you do it without making the reader have an existential crisis before they reach the Age of Conscience?

There were a few portraits of important historical figures, though: Irene, Le Navigateur and Dolores Dei, of course, and the various explorers who’d died there.

(The book said “disappeared” as if they might still come back to parades and rose petals, but nothing comes back from the Pale whole. Little you, in your little white nightgown, a tiny blonde doll in a princess-themed room, was counting on it.)

fourth.

“Do you think I’m a bad decision?”

“Do _you_ think you’re a bad decision?”

“Yes.”

“...You’re not. And if you were, I’d still make you every time.”

A conversation you have with him many, many times. A conversation he has with you many, many times.

Sometimes, you/he was genuinely asking, but mostly, you/he just wanted reassurance. “I love you” was not enough. 

fifth.

At first, he liked your area of study. You think.

He liked (likes?) anything that seems supra-natural and, despite the fact of its existence, the Pale does seem to be that -- a region where everything is suspended, including the laws of nature. A fantasy story, or an overwrought metaphor. The sort of thing Harry liked to read and the sort of thing he liked to use in conversation. 

And you’ve always liked talking about the Pale, which made the first few dates rather simple. Him asking you questions and you answering them.

(“But how do people come back from it, if it...dissolves everything?”

“By going too fast for it to catch you, love.”

He blushed, when you called him love. You would’ve done anything for him, then.)

When you were younger, women of a certain age were not allowed on research trips into the Pale. Historically, women were rarely allowed to do anything, of course, but more recently, there were medical concerns about what effects it would have on the development of a fetus. (As if contraceptives didn’t exist. As if the only thing that mattered was the womb. As if it wouldn’t be of scientific interest to see what _would_ happen.)

But things changed. All of a sudden, logistics companies started hiring women to work as long-haul drivers, and women could get the same travelling licenses as men, and universities started funding teams where women held field positions and were more than glorified secretaries. 

(A sudden pain: he believed in charms, Dora. He really, really believed in them. He had his lucky, hideous tie, and those snakeskin boots, and -- 

An ugly bracelet, made from copper so cheap that it stained your skin green. An ugly bracelet, made up of little lung-shaped beads. He’d found it while dumpster diving, and instantly, he’d thought of you. He cleaned and polished the beads, and re-strung them with a new leather cord, and put it in a little twist of plain brown paper. He left it on your pillow, so you’d find it when you finally made it back to Voyager Lane.

Two months into living in Mirova, the cord snapped while you crossed the street. There was no time to pick up the beads before traffic started up again.)

People speak of over-radiation from the Pale, but it’s not well studied. There’s no decontamination period for travellers across the Pale, just relief that they made it in one piece. You wonder if Pale radiation is the same as nuclear radiation. If you carried remnants of it with you home, like a doting scientist before radium was considered hazardous material: here’s something for the kids to play with!

If it’s why the city started speaking to him. If it was your fault that things began to fall apart. But, if that were true, he should’ve gotten better when you left and -- 

He’d only gotten worse.

(SOMEBODY HAD TO LOOK OUT FOR HIM. HE CERTAINLY WASN’T LOOKING OUT FOR HIMSELF.)

Every time you came back from a trip, you practically _ran_ home. You would always go home straight away. No matter how dirty you were. No matter how long you’d been gone. _Harry_ was waiting for you. You couldn’t keep him waiting. 

Even when he stopped waiting for you, because he was out on patrol, or stuck on a case, or drinking himself blind, traces of him were there: dirty plates piled up in the sink. Ashtray full of Astras. Bottles cleaned out and waiting to be taken to Frittte. A half-made bed. (A small present on your pillow.) All the detritus he’d collected without you there to clean it up for him. Those were the only times you felt like somebody’s wife, which is to say: a housemaid no one had to pay. 

Not that you wanted for anything, or had anything you could admit to wanting. Not that you could complain.

And again, he paid all the bills, didn’t he? And the ones he didn’t, Mother and Father did. 

(“This is coming out of your inheritance, you know.” He said it casually, not even looking over his newspaper.

You thought about the latest batch of papers concluding that the end of the world would be in approximately forty years. You thought about the average life expectancy of your average Jamrocker and you did consider yourself a Jamrocker now, so.

You liked your odds.

“I know, Father. If I’m still around for the estate reading, I promise I won’t contest anything.” 

“I’m not worried about you. I’m worried about _him_.”

The sound of dishes breaking. Harry apologizing again and again, no, really, he normally doesn’t have butterfingers like this, sorry, sorry, and you hated your father. You hadn’t planned on outliving him, but you suddenly had a reason: to spit on his grave.)

You had a stipend, but L’Academie de La Revachol had never had much interest in entreponetics. They were always too busy with History, or Political Theory, or Economics, or some mix of the three. Sometimes, a little bit of Fine Art, unless it was one of those periods where it was considered bourgeois to make it, or one of those periods where it was considered unprofitable. The stipend reflected that attitude by being 100 réal a month or 200 réal, if you were in the field. Other universities paid better, or were in countries that had real governments with money for actual grants.

As you said, he liked your field of study, at first. He liked coming home to a house full of the warm smells of stress baking and he liked coming into the bedroom to see you hunched over at your desk. He’d wrap his arms around you, then. Sometimes, you’d be so absorbed, it took you a few minutes to notice him, which let him settle himself around you, and into you, like a cat.

(Whatever happened to the cats he used to feed. The ones he trapped and took to the vet, the ones he named, and wept for. You were fond of them, but he loved them.)

And then you finished your second year of grad school, and the laws changed, and as soon as they told you could go, you went. It was the first time you broke up with him, because he pressed you up against a wall and told you that he’d shoot himself if you left him for that long. Because you are who you are (stupid), you kicked him until he let go. You left him bleeding. You prayed that the earth would crack and swallow you up like it did Therése de les arbres, when she abandoned her lover Carmilla to the wild sea.

When you came back, he had finished training with the RCM. It was better than finding a corpse, but not by much.

(You left him all alone, Dodo. What was he supposed to do? Be a normal human being? Function as if his entire life hadn’t been one trauma after another, as if he hadn’t grown up poor in Revachol?) 

sixth.

He always had a taste for coldness. For opening people up, or cracking them open. A former athlete, he liked a _challenge._

Maybe that’s why he thought he loved you: the divinely beautiful, divinely powerful saint. His savior, from on high. His beloved, distant even when she was wrapped in his embrace. Someone who he could bring down to Elysium if he could just _envelop_ her completely.

What a disappointment it would have been if he’d ever figured out you were just another middle-class intellectual with middle-class sensibilities about emotions (namely: no one should know you are anything other than content). 

seventh.

You are sick of knowing. You are sick of remembering. Instead of the blurring, the _erasure_ promised by both your teachers and your colleagues, you still know. You still remember. You will never be allowed to forget.

eighth.

He held onto paper bags, plastic bags, cloth bags from giveaways and store openings. Plastic jars, glass jars. Posters, flyers, bits of paper if they had numbers on them. (Not full phone numbers, necessarily. Sometimes just numbers someone somewhere had scrawled on scrap for some reason.) Other ephemera, found in the trash.

“Why?”

This was early on in your relationship. Before you broke up for the first time, when you first started living together.

(You joked about it being in the college kid slums. Harry said nothing, for once. The apartment wasn’t that bad: a studio, with oven included. No bugs, not even in the summer.)

“Well. It’s better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.”

You never really needed anything, and if you did, it was simple to get it.

That was always true, even when you set your sights on a “man with no prospects”. (Read: a poor, working-class motherfucker who was never going to have any goddamn money, no matter what he did.) Mother and Father wouldn’t have let you starve. Having a useless, bohemian daughter was almost a point of pride for them; a source of sympathy (pity) from their friends, a quality that made them interesting to have at dinner parties.

(“You’ll never believe what Dolores told me about Jamrock. Apparently, it’s common for the children there to--”) 

Even though he could tell you the history of every single bit of rubble you passed by, Harry was not a historian. Certain things, he managed to keep his mouth shut about. Himself, mainly. Or, really, where he had come from. What did come out was _so_ dreadful: running in the streets with other kids, all of them dead by thirty; polio as a child that nearly killed him; or scrabbling about the catacombs, looking for treasure and finding used needles instead.

His life before you was behind a door neither of you had an interest in unlocking.

ninth.

“How did you put up with him for so long?”

In the future, someone will ask you that. 

(She hates me. She hates me. Kill yourself, asshole. You were a burden to her, and you’re a burden to Kim, now, and they’d both be better off without you. You’re only as good as your mind and that’s always been shit, hasn’t it, and it’s just getting worse. Kill yourself.)

In the future, you’ll see your ex-partner Not Listening at the other end of the hallway, and you’ll laugh, in the polite-but-friendly way your mother taught you to do whenever you were angry but couldn’t show it.

“It was a joint venture, always -- we put up with each other, until we couldn’t.” A pause. “And he liked it here too much to move to Mirova with me.”

Harry’s shoulders relax. Yours relax, too.

etc.

It’s amazing what he chooses to remember. Absolutely fucking amazing. Dora, _darling_ , you wouldn’t believe the effect you had, you’re still having on the man. Or the idea of you, anyway. Or, more precisely, the lover-saint he’s created out of what’s left of his memories of you and Dolores Dei, your namesake.

(Literally translated: “God’s Sorrow.” God’s sorrow. What an awful thing to call yourself. What an awful thing to name a baby. He was the only one who could make your formal name sound lovely. He only said the whole thing once, before you begged him to forget it.)

(That plea will be funny, later.)

You never should’ve told him that; you didn’t know yet that he could wring beauty and meaning out of discarded _cans_ , let alone the most important Innocence in human history, but that’s no excuse. There’s no excuses for girls like you, with multiple degrees and zero job prospects outside of academia. 

You should’ve known better. You’re always supposed to know better, somehow, because you happened to be born on the Nice, Pretty side of the river.

Oh, the _gum_ ! Do you remember the _gum_ , Dorie? The only brand of nicotine gum you liked, the one they don’t have in Mirova. Apricot gum that tasted nothing like real apricots, thankfully, with the nicotine’s black pepper to brighten it.

(“How can you like fake ap-ri-cot more than real ap-ri-cot?”

“ _A-pri-cot_ , first of all --”

“Snob.”

“Roughneck.” 

And then laughter. You made him so happy. He made _you_ so happy. You could’ve spent the rest of your life with him, if that hadn’t meant watching him kill himself.)

When the manufacturer went out of business, he went out and bought boxes of the stuff. The nicotine would have lost its potency before you had made it through even a quarter of it; the gum itself would become brittle before you had made it through half.

A pointless gesture, to be sure, but all gestures are pointless. 

The current mainstream view of the Pale is that it’s expanding into livable space in the same way that the desert expands in the absence of vegetation: something that humans could prevent simply by planting more trees, except we don’t know what sort of trees can resist the Pale’s undoing. 

A recent paper suggests that the Pale is more like a cancer or a mold: something that can creep, something that can grow in secret until it’s too late to remove it. Except that many cancers can be excised and most mold can be killed.

You thought about taking them with you, when you left, but you didn’t want to pay for shipping, and you hadn’t wanted to wait. (Hadn’t you waited long enough? Hadn’t you spent your whole life _waiting_? Any hesitation felt like falling backwards, into a stagnant pool.)

Harry probably binned it. Even he wasn’t that sentimental, surely.

(Don’t lie to yourself. He _is_ that sentimental. When he and Kim [don’t worry, you’ll meet him later] cleaned up his house, there were twelve cases of it in his attic. The sweet summer smell of it overwhelmed Harry and he passed out, you terrible, awful woman. And Kim didn’t know about the gum, or about you.

Nothing important, anyway, like your favorite kind of gum or the precise look on your face when Harry told you the city spoke to him, as if that had any meaning to you. So he worried about blood loss, or a stroke, or some other medical event likely to occur in a middle-aged alcoholic recently punctured by several bullets.

After all that: that’s when he binned it.) 

Now, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Stop crying, there’s a good girl, you’ll give yourself wrinkles. We can’t have that, can we? You’ve got an _appointment_. You’ve got a site to look over and notes to take. Mother and Father are expecting you for dinner and it’s been so long since they’ve last seen you. 

Maybe he’s dead. 

He hasn’t called you in months. He told you (not for the first time) that he wanted to die. But all of the old set kept tabs on him, would’ve relished the opportunity to bludgeon you with his tombstone. 

(He was Dora’s Gym Teacher Friend. Then, he was Dora’s Cop Friend. _Then_ , it was Harrier. Revolutionary names were uncommon among her set. All the girls were Dolores or Irene, all the boys were named after their fathers. They liked reminding you of that. Everyone was So Happy when you “finally” left him. So happy, that you wanted to take the first aero back to Revachol and the first cab to Precinct 41.)

Maybe he’s still alive.

Not that you want to see him, of course. Not that you want to see your absolute wreck of an ex, the one that wanted to drag you down to Hell with him. No, no, you're not that pathetic. You still take his calls, no matter how fucked up he sounds on the other end of the line. You haven’t changed your phone number. You haven’t told Revmir anything substantial: “Harry’s an old friend, constantly in and out of trouble. He’s always undergoing some ordeal or another.” You don’t tell Revmir anything substantial because he would insist on complaining to someone about it, which would make the phone calls stop.

That’s how pathetic you are, Dolores.

From the aerodrome to Le Jardin; from Le Jardin to the 8/81; from the 8/81 to Martinaise. From a fishing village, to the church. Or what was a church. Or what belonged to the Ecclesiastes and now belongs to anodic music. No bus for you, sweetheart. Didi (AKA DD AKA Dolores Désjardins, another casualty of Moralist parents) offered to drive you to the village at least.

She’s an awful woman. You love her dearly.

Didi drops you off at a rusted gate, surrounded by wild grass. There are a few little kids in the weeds, openly staring at you. Their faces are dirty, but the sun is so bright and the air so warm that it seems charming instead of concerning.

You walk down a dirt path. There are poppies, and oleander, and various dandelions. 

How bucolic. It must be a shithole in the wintertime.

As you get closer, you see two men: one in black, the other in orange. The man in black is smoking, while the man in orange writes in a notebook. 

“Can I help you, ma’am?” 

Standing on the portico is Harry, if Harry had gotten older. If he had stopped drinking. If he had grown that beautiful, stupid moustache back. Beside him is another man in clothing that could’ve been civvies if not for the RCM’s white rectangle. A colleague, obviously, but not anyone from your time.

“Harrier? Harrier du Bois?

That’s right, girl. Start out formal. Use that to hide your shock. Hope that you’re hallucinating. That the Pale’s radiation is finally getting to be too much, making old memories collapse into the present. That it’s some other peeler standing there.

“Yes?”

“...It’s me, Dora?” 

“Oh! Oh.” A pause, as he searches your face. Oh. Oh, no. He doesn’t recognize you. Can’t blame him, can you? You’ve gotten older, too. You’re not fresh-faced and just out of university, anymore, are you? 

(The woman in front of him who claims to be Dora does not look like any depiction or manifestation of Dolores Dei that he can remember, thank god. Her blonde hair is cropped short into something mannish. Her face is bare. She smiles at him, nervous, a cigarette dangling from her lip. One of those intelligentsia you see on the backs of philosophy books, grave and ironic. She’s unspeakably beautiful.

The problem here is that while he has no idea who she is, he has the sudden, competing urges to hug her close, scream at her, and fall sobbing at her feet. So, he chooses the least creepy option and stands there, stock-still.)

(So that’s what she looks like, he thinks. So that’s who everyone blames. She looks tired. Poor woman.)

“Dora Ingerlund, Ph.D. Enteroponetic researcher. We were together for fifteen years. You like to call me, sometimes.” 

( _I dream of you, often._ You want to tell him that. You want him to know that you wake up in a cold sweat, sometimes, because you just saw your ex-partner’s bloated corpse drowned in a pool of its own vomit; sometimes you sleepily reach out for him, only to find the unfamiliar shape of Revmir.)

His face crumples. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Dora, I shouldn’t have--” Harry sputters, desperate to get the words out. “I just. The last time I called.” A pause. “I have amnesia. Or, a sort of amnesia --”

You suppress a sigh. “Yeah. That happens. You always come back to yourself, eventually.”

“...How long is eventually?” He doesn’t look at you when he asks this. 

Your stomach sinks. 

“Twenty-three days, at most. Ten days on average, with a median of five days.”

Good girl. Put it into numbers. That’ll make it easy to swallow.

(Always after a particularly bad case. Or a case that was particularly bitter-tasting. Always after a case where he needed something to wash out his mouth and he always chose booze. Always you, helping him pick up the pieces, terrified that he wasn’t going to come back this time. “Cleaning out the rooms”, he called it, done too rarely to base a predictive algorithm on it, but often enough that you wished you could have.)

(A conversation floats up from the past: some junior officer sent over from the precinct to drag Harry back to hell.

“Mrs. Du Bois?”

“Dr. Ingerlund, actually.” 

“Ah.” 

“Do you need something? Are you here about Harry?” 

“Yes and yes.” 

“He’s still indisposed.” 

“Which means?” 

“Sick, he’s still _sick_.” 

“I know what indisposed means. What I meant was, does he know who he is, yet?”

“...Not yet.”)

He’s frozen, staring off into the distance. The city is calling to him, maybe, or maybe he’s trying to remember all the other world-erasing benders, or maybe it’s just upsetting to hear that he can expect to lose his memory again and again and again, and there’s nothing he can do about it, and he’s always going to be a stranger in a strange land.

“Interesting.”

“...Harry.”

“I’m sorry, that’s all I want to say. I...don’t know what exactly happened, but --”

You hate apologies. You especially hate the word “sorry”. They’re wastes of breath. Either someone forgives you or they don’t; either you forgive someone or you don’t. All the talking in the world cannot erase what has happened, what is happening. You’ve always hated “sorry”.

Remember, it never hurts to be direct with Harry. Never hurts to set up boundaries. If you give an inch, he’ll take a mile. His name is Harrier -- a type of dog kept for hunting small animals, a type of hawk flying free. You can flee to another isola, but if you reply to _one_ letter, or pick up the phone _once_ , he’ll renew his efforts, until you give in, or he dies, or both.

The thought makes it easier to cut him off.

“I’m here about the 1 mm hole. I expect to be here discussing the matter with Ms. Luukanen-Kilde until the evening, at which point I will be going to Le Jardin to eat dinner with my parents. Then, I will go to sleep. There is no room in that schedule for me to re-litigate the past --”

The other police officer interrupts you: “1 mm hole? It’s 2 mm.”

“It’s getting smaller, officer.” From a far distance, you notice how flat your voice is.

“Good. That’s...good.”

“Indeed.”

Dodo! For once, you were right, Dodo! 

(You were right plenty of times, not that he ever admitted it. Not that he didn’t interrogate you like you were some fucking kingpin, like you weren’t his _partner_. His Dolores Dei, at whose feet he claimed to worship. His fiancée, not that there was any point to marriage, with the Pale’s inexorable growth.) 

The job _did_ do this to him! Does it make you feel good to know that you were right? That Revachol was gutting him? That he was gutting himself, really, feeding his entrails to Revachol’s gaping maw? That all cops are bastards, and baby, he’s a fucking cop?

“I told you this job was killing you.”

Harry glances at the other police officer. Whatever he had expected you to say next, it wasn’t that.

“...Did you? I can’t remember.” 

“This isn’t funny.”

No, more like cracking his skull open -- dissolving his brain with alcohol and speed and pyrholidon into a chemical mash --

Are you happy? Are you happy to see how bad he is? If you were a better woman, if your nose wasn’t stuck in a book, if you cared about normal things like normal people do --

“Dora? _Dora_.” He reaches out to grab your shoulders. You flinch and his hands drop. “I’m sorry.”

The dam bursts. You’re 26 again, and breaking up with him for the first time. Your voice is that of a petulant child because that’s what you are, essentially, isn’t it? Coddled your whole life, insulated from reality and when you don’t get precisely what you want, you _whine_. You accuse as if there’s justice --

“No, you aren’t. You always do this. You just keep saying sorry until someone forgives you, so you can turn around and go right back to doing something _else_ wrong.”

“I _am_ sorry. For everything.”

“Yes, well. I’m sorry, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> i will add more parts/more chapters, but i needed to just publish this and see what people thought, good or bad.
> 
> find me on tumblr @wanggretzky or twitter @staleblood69


End file.
